Posture adjustment method for large components of aircraft based on hybrid force-position control

Abstract

Purpose

Flexible tooling for adjusting the posture of large components of aircraft (LCA) is composed of several numerical control locators (NCLs). Because of the manufacture and installation errors of NCL, the traditional control method of NCL may cause great interaction force between NCLs and form the internal force of LCA during the process of posture adjustment. Aiming at this problem, the purpose of this paper is to propose a control method for posture adjustment system based on hybrid force-position control (HFPC) to reduce the internal force of posture adjustment.

Design/methodology/approach

First of all, the causes of internal force of posture adjustment were analyzed by using homogeneous transformation matrix and inverse kinematics. Then, axles of NCLs were divided into position control axle and force control axle based on the screw theory, and the dynamic characteristics of each axle were simulated by MATLAB. Finally, a simulated posture adjustment system was built in the laboratory to carry out HFPC experiment and was compared with the other two traditional control methods for posture adjustment.

Findings

The experiment results show that HFPC method for redundant actuated parallel mechanism (RAPM) can significantly reduce the interaction force between NCLs.

Originality/value

In this paper, HFPC is applied to the control of the posture adjustment system, which reduces the internal force of LCA and improves the assembly quality of aircraft parts.

Citation

Chu, W. and Huang, X. (2020), "Posture adjustment method for large components of aircraft based on hybrid force-position control", Industrial Robot, Vol. 47 No. 3, pp. 381-393. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-10-2019-0212